Never Doing That Again
by BeckyH77
Summary: Jack should be more careful of who and what he crawls into bed with. Characters: Jack, Nine, Rose. Warnings: Mpreg, hold the fluff, add humor. AN: I ranted about mpreg and then decided to see if I could do it better I could. Beta'd and britpicked.


Jack made it back to the TARDIS just before dawn and just in time to earn a glare from The Doctor and a mildly concerned look from Rose. He was too tired to care much about either. He'd spent a wonderful night licking fantastic chocolate off delicately scaled skin under the light of two moons and all he really wanted now was a shower and sleep.

He stayed up long enough to listen to Rose tell him what she'd done on the planet and find out where they were going later, but by the time he made it to his room he knew there was no way he was going to last long enough to shower. He didn't even undress; he just collapsed face down on his bed and passed out.

Passed out was apparently the right word because by the time he regained his senses it was the middle of TARDIS night and his mouth tasted as if something had died in it. He got up long enough to brush his teeth, take a shower and drink a truly copious amount of water before he crawled back into bed and slept until morning.

When he woke the second time, he still felt drained and thirsty but he wasn't really worried about it. He was close enough to normal to write it off as a hard night, a mild virus or time-lag, and he did. He went out with Rose and The Doctor, played with them on frozen, crystalline waves and forgot about it.

He continued to drink a lot of water and need more sleep than usual, but it took more than a week and waking up at 2 a.m. TARDIS (and London) time with a searing pain in his stomach and running up his back to decide maybe something was wrong after all.

Jack rolled from his back to his side with a grimace and sat up gingerly. It took him a minute to fight off dizziness and nausea before he could stand. Getting dressed was an unusually slow and careful process, but by the time he finished the pain had subsided to a dull ache and the nausea wasn't as threatening. Since he was awake, he decided to see if drinking something warm would finish settling his stomach.

It never occurred to him to go looking for The Doctor. He was half way through a cup of tea when The Doctor found him anyway, sitting in the kitchen in his bare feet and with his hair sticking up.

"What are you doing up?" The Doctor asked.

Jack shrugged one shoulder and sipped his tea. "Woke up and couldn't go back to sleep."

"Bit odd for you lately, isn't it?" The Doctor asked as he started to rummage through the cabinets, pulling them open seemingly at random.

Jack turned in his chair to watch him. "Hey, I'm a growing boy. I need my rest."

The Doctor turned and pinned Jack with a serious look. "You're a fifty-first century kind of guy, Jack. You should need, what? Four or five hours, tops? Certainly not ten, twelve, fourteen." He paused, then added: "_Eighteen_."

"I'd had a long night!" Jack protested.

The Doctor leaned against the counter, his hands on either side of him. "And you're feeling much better now."

"Completely," Jack replied.

"Totally," The Doctor supplied with a level look and just a bit of challenge in his voice.

"Just fine," Jack ground out without the slightest idea why he was lying.

"Then why are you drinking tea? You hate tea." The Doctor sounded worried and smug, something Jack found supremely irritating just then. Also, hot, but that went without saying, in Jack's world.

"I just felt like tea," Jack said; his voice was more level than his temper. He took a last swallow of his drink. "And now I'm going back to bed," he said and stood.

Standing was apparently a bad idea. The weird, hot pain came back, radiating from somewhere deep in his guts to his back, and with it came the nausea and a wave of vertigo. Jack barely managed to grab the edge of the table to save himself from falling.

"Oh yeah. You're just fine all right." The Doctor's tone was warmer than his words, but not by much.

The Doctor pivoted Jack's chair around and urged him back into it. Jack sat and spread his legs and put his hands in his hair - he kept his head down, his eyes shut and his breathing shallow until the pain and nausea subsided.

Once the worst had passed, he dropped his hands between his knees and looked up at The Doctor. "All right, all right, I'll see a doctor."

The look The Doctor gave Jack would have incinerated a lesser man. Or a smarter one.

"What?" Jack asked.

The Doctor rolled his eyes and shook his head.

"What?" Jack asked again. "What did I do this time?"

* * *

The walk down to the medical labs didn't take long. Convincing Jack that The Doctor was a doctor took longer -- about as long as it had taken Jack to convince The Doctor that he really was a captain, come to think of it. 

Once The Doctor got Jack on the table he told him to "lie back and think of Villenguard."

"With the bananas?" Jack asked, dryly.

The Doctor adjusted the settings on his sonic screwdriver and pulled it slowly along the length of Jack's body. "Why not? You spend enough time chasing them."

"I don't chase… "He stopped and pushed up on his elbows."Was that innuendo?"

The Doctor finished what he was doing and grinned at Jack. "Absolutely not. Never. Wouldn't tell you if it was. You're pregnant."

Jack lifted one eyebrow. "I'm what?"

"Pregnant." The Doctor repeated.

"Doctor, in case you hadn't noticed from your cloister, I am a_ guy_. Guys don't get pregnant."

"Would you prefer 'infected with a parasitic alien embryo'?" The Doctor asked with a smile.

The look on Jack's face could have spoken for him but he still gave voice to his opinion. "Ew. No. That's disgusting."

"Right then, pregnant it is," The Doctor said as he tossed his screwdriver end over end and caught it again.

Jack flopped back onto the bed with a grimace and a groan. "Well, what are we going to do about it?!"

"Do about it?" The Doctor turned to rummage in a drawer, rattling through the contents. "Well, I'm sure Rose will be thrilled. The two of you could shop for baby things in Cardiff."

Jack sat up slowly. "Would you be serious? I can't be pregnant! Where is the thing? My liver?" he asked snidely.

The Doctor pulled something out of the drawer that was shiny, metal and looked sharp. He ignored the fact that Jack was staring at his back as he scrutinized the object. "Just under, actually. It must have taken most of a week to burrow its way up from your intestines."

"I can't be pregnant," Jack tried to joke. "I'll be a terrible mother."

The Doctor threw the instrument back into the drawer and then shut it with enough force to make the contents rattle. "Don't you just wish you'd thought of that sooner?" he asked as turned to face Jack.

Jack hoped that was a rhetorical question because he sure as hell wasn't answering it. "Can't you just cut it out or something?"

The Doctor folded his arms across his chest and shook his head.

"This is not the time for an object lesson, Doctor." Jack's voice rose; he was starting to sound a little worried and a lot annoyed.

"Can't, not won't. That embryo of yours is sitting right on top of two major blood vessels running straight through your stupid human body. If you'd told me before it started moving, say a week or so ago… "

"Hold up," Jack interrupted. "There is no way I could have known I was ... infested." Apparently infested was better than pregnant.

"But you knew something was wrong, didn't you? Right from the start."

"No!" Jack denied. A split second pause and then he added: "Yes." Before admitting: "Maybe. I don't know!"

"You knew," he told Jack. Jack just blinked at him.

"Isn't there something more important we should be discussing? Like how to get this thing out of me?" Jack asked

"It can't be removed surgically without killing you, it can't come out the way it went in, and it's growing. How do you think it's going to come out?"

Jack went pale and held onto the edge of the bed. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"And now you're starting to get it."

* * *

The Doctor got a description of Jack's sexual activity for the past month (Just to be safe. Really) then sent Jack back to his room while he searched the TARDIS database. He didn't have a lot of time to find answers, and not just because listening to Jack recount a month's worth of sex had taken a very long time and Rose was going to wake up soon. No, time was of the essence because as far as The Doctor knew Jack's life was in danger and in more ways than he'd told the captain. 

There was no way to know if the thing inside Jack was still moving or if it had already attached itself to Jack and was feeding on him like the parasite he'd so glibly referred to it as. Either way, sooner or later it would very well do irreversible damage to something Jack needed to survive.

Those thoughts kept racing through The Doctor's mind as he worked. He searched and cross-referenced. Compared, contrasted and eliminated until there was only one possibility left and it had to be the truth. He sat back in his chair with a sigh, the profile of the reptilian species displayed in technicolor on the monitor. He slowly relaxed and his shoulders came down from around his ears.

Oh, it could kill Jack all right, but it probably wouldn't. In fact, as far as threats to Jack's life went, The Doctor shaking him to death for being an idiot was a greater risk.

He was still sitting there, glaring at the screen when Rose walked in. He switched the computer off, turned to her with a grin, told her that Jack was having another nap (lazy bastard) and the day belonged to her. Rose decided where to go and what she wanted to do and they had a nice time in spite of a few uncomfortably probing questions about Jack's well being that The Doctor didn't answer.

He saw no reason to tell her that Jack had been knocked up by a reptile that used warm-blooded bodies to incubate their young. Not before he'd told Jack, anyhow, and now that he knew Jack's life wasn't in any immediate danger, there was no reason to spoil Rose's fun.

Besides, Jack needed all the rest he could get.

* * *

The Doctor explained the situation to him that night after Rose was asleep. 

"Wait, what?" Jack asked.

"What part didn't you understand?" The Doctor was clearly trying very hard to be patient. He was just as clearly failing.

"The part where I had sex and _got an embryo shot up my ass_."

"You humans! Three thousand years of evolution and you still can't think outside the box."

"Oh, I can think outside the box, all right," Jack grinned in a way that made it look less like he was amused and more like he wanted to bite something. "And inside it and on top of it. Twice."

"Would you be serious? This is your life we're talking about!"

"Haven't we had this conversation, only the other way around?" Jack asked The Doctor with his eyebrow up and hand gestures to accompany the question.

The Doctor shut his eyes and counted to ten, breathing deeply. It didn't help, so he repeated the exercise. Four times. He opened his eyes to find Jack staring at him with a hint of humor and a lot of frank assessment in his blue eyes.

"Right," The Doctor said matter-of-factly. "It probably won't kill you but we need to get you to a good medical facility before you deliver."

"That makes perfect sense, except the part where I don't want to deliver it, I just want it out."

"How else do you expect you're going to get it out?" The Doctor challenged.

"Doctor, I spent the six hours I was awake today either curled up in a ball wishing I was dead or puking my guts up and wishing I was dead. I don't care if that thing comes out alive. In fact if it does, I might just kill it. I'm sure as hell not waiting around for however many months it takes for it to mature just so it can chew itself out through my ribcage. I want it out and I want it out _now_."

"I'm not going to let you die." He sounded so steady, so sure about that. The Doctor took Jack by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes. "There's no reason anyone has to die." And then he sounded so desperate that Jack relaxed but didn't relent entirely.

"Just be miserable," he said, sighing. "What am I supposed to do with a baby, anyway? And what do we tell Rose?"

The Doctor grinned and shook Jack briefly before he let him go and started to pace around Jack's room. "Fantastic! Nothing to worry about. It'll take about three months before it's ready to come out. When it is we can take you to New New York and they'll give you an oestrogen injection and--"

"They'll give me what?" He had been watching The Doctor pace, slightly amused, a little fond and definitely tired until that word. Oestrogen. Then he just looked confused.

The Doctor pivoted back toward him, full of manic energy and excitement. "Oestrogen. I told you once already. Weren't you listening?"

"I was listening just fine and you didn't say anything about oestrogen."

"I did. You just weren't paying attention."

"I was paying close attention," he argued. "And even if I wasn't, I would have noticed mentions of female sex hormones."

"You'd have noticed the mention of sex, anyway," The Doctor mocked.

"Can we get back to the oestrogen thing?" Jack didn't quite plead, but it was close.

"Oh, right. They'll give you a shot of oestrogen, you'll taste absolutely disgusting to the alien reptile baby and it'll let go and they can get it out without making confetti of your liver."

There was a pause where Jack contemplated the scenario before he managed to ask: "That's good. Right?" He wasn't sure.

"That's _fantastic_, Jack. Once it's out we can take it back to where you picked it up and everybody's happy!"

"Thrilled," Jack deadpanned. "What about Rose?"

"What about… Oh, tell her the truth. She'll love it!"

* * *

Rose didn't look much like she loved it. "You're what!?" 

That question was awfully familiar. Jack sighed in a long-suffering kind of way and pulled one knee toward his chest to take some of the pressure off his back. "Would you prefer infested with an alien parasite?"

Rose screwed up her face. "Ew. No. That's--"

"Disgusting," Jack finished for her. This whole conversation was awfully familiar.

"You can't be pregnant, Jack, you're a bloke."

Jack held up both his hands. "Yes, yes, I know. I'm a guy. Guys can't get pregnant."

She touched her nose and pointed at him.

"Have I got something on my face?" he asked her as he rubbed at his own nose.

"No, no, it means you've got it right on the nose."

"I… You know what? Never mind. That's not the point. The point is you've got to learn to think outside the box."

"Think outside the box," she repeated skeptically.

"Right. Think outside the box. With aliens and time travel and advanced technology, anything's possible."

"So, outside the box, you've got a uterus."

"Rose!" This worked so much better for The Doctor.

"It isn't going to hurt you, is it?" Real worry colored her voice and her expression and Jack loved her for it.

"Not much, according to The Doctor. We'll hang around, go get it pulled out when it's done being a leech and then take the thing home." Her concern was touching, but there was no way he was telling her about the oestrogen.

"Jack! You can't call your baby a leech." She sounded absolutely horrified, but her expression was all admonishment. She looked, Jack decided, like her mother.

He almost growled his rebuttal. "It is not my baby. It has none of my DNA, I had nothing to do with its conception and it is… Okay, it's not really a leech, but it may as well be."

"Leeches don't have scales," Rose said and smirked. At Jack's withering look she conceded, sort of. "All right already. Don't have a lizard!" She paused. "Get it? Lizard?"

Jack took a deep breath and opened his mouth to respond but didn't get anything out before she'd gone on. "So, shopping for maternity clothes? Could be fun."

Jack wished he knew what terrified him more: That Rose had got the best of him, that she thought this sounded like a good excuse to go shopping, or actually going shopping with Rose.

"Not in Cardiff." He tried to save the tattered remnants of his dignity. From the way Rose was grinning at him, it hadn't worked very well. "And no flowers!"

* * *

The shopping trip with Rose was the last time Jack went out. 

By the time he hit what was, as far as any of them could tell, the one month mark, the nausea was replaced by a low-level but constant ache under his ribs that wrapped around his sides and made his back spasm. He couldn't stay awake for more than half an hour and -- something none of them expected and all of them should have anticipated -- become irritable and aggressive.

The Doctor's only remark on the subject of Jack's continual bad mood was "of course!" in a gleeful way that made Jack want to strangle him. Apparently, it had something to do with increased testosterone levels. Jack didn't care; being cranky was the least of his worries. Rose had decided, probably wisely, to stay out of his way most of the time.

At two months, Jack not only couldn't stay awake but also stopped being able to sleep for very long. The sleep deprivation did nothing to improve his attitude.

He didn't look anything like a pregnant woman, either, which seemed to disappoint Rose. On one of the rare occasions when Jack was awake enough to pay attention, he overheard The Doctor explaining to her that it was because the fetus was simply wedged under Jack's ribs with none of the "sloppy human stuff" like placenta and amniotic fluid to take up space. Jack was glad; he would have hated to lose his girlish figure.

Around that point, Jack realized the thing was moving inside him again. It wriggled, writhed and squirmed, aggravating the pain in his back and further hampering his ability to sleep. It certainly did not make Jack feel maternal. In fact, it made him want to claw through his abdomen, rip the thing out and throw it into the nearest wall.

Two months and two weeks into the pregnancy, Jack turned yellow and passed out in the kitchen.

It was a wake-up call for The Doctor. When Jack came around, he was on a table in the medical lab with The Doctor was hovering over him looking less like an over-eager expectant grandparent and more worried than he had in weeks.

Jack rubbed his face and started to sit up. "What happened?"

"You fainted." The Doctor put his hand on Jack's shoulder to keep him from sitting. "You're also jaundiced, dehydrated and anaemic."

"Oh, well if that's all." Jack pushed The Doctor's hand away and struggled the rest of the way up. He only grimaced a little.

"Jack, would you be- -" The Doctor started but was cut off by Jack's glare.

"No," Jack told him unequivocally, "I won't be serious and I won't lie back down like a good boy." He swung his legs over the edge of the table, rubbed his face and stretched his back.

"I'm taking you to the hospital," The Doctor said and turned to leave.

"_The hell you are_," Jack growled softly.

The Doctor turned back with an incredulous expression. "What?"

"I said the hell you are," Jack repeated clearly. "It's two weeks before this thing's done cooking and I haven't been miserable this long just so it can die -- and you can mope -- now."

"What?" The Doctor asked again. "You didn't want the thing to begin with!"

Jack enjoyed The Doctor being the one confused for a change. "I still don't want it. That's not the point. You said no one had to die. No one's going to die."

The Doctor looked at Jack for a long time, silent and narrow eyed. Jack looked back, level and unflinching.

"All right," The Doctor finally said. "Go get a drink of water and then lie down."

Jack grinned and pushed himself off the table. "You've got yourself a deal."

The Doctor waited until Jack had left to go back to the control room and send the TARDIS to the hospital.

* * *

The tantrum Jack threw when he found himself at the hospital could have been embarrassing. It wasn't, but only because the nurses were cats and very good at ignoring undignified behavior. They checked Jack in and bustled him off to a room with minimal fuss. The Doctor and Rose trailed behind, Rose carrying a small pink fleece blanket in one hand. 

They weren't left alone in the room for long. Jack didn't even have time to yell at The Doctor before a pretty little tabby came in and told Jack to take his clothes off. Jack leered, offered her a handshake and introduction with a cheesy grin that might have been more seductive and less creepy if his eyes hadn't been yellow-tinged and ringed by dark circles.

The Doctor growled, Rose hid her face in the blanket and Jack gave up and started stripping. He took his shoes off first, then his shirt. He threw his shirt at the Doctor with a little more force than was strictly playful. The Doctor, of course, caught it.

Jack unbuttoned his pants, pushed them down and stepped out of them, completely unselfconscious. When he bent down to pick them up, the nurse stepped forward and jabbed a needle into Jack's hip.

"Ow!" Jack yelped and straightened rapidly to rub at his hip. "Isn't that a little... primitive?"

"Yes." The nurse answered simply, her tone haughty. She ignored Jack's glare as completely as his leer. "Lie down. That shot will relax you. We will give you the hormone when we are ready to remove the…"

"Don't you dare call it a baby," Jack warned.

"…baby," she finished with a smile that showed her pointy teeth.

Jack shut up, gave up again and lay down. The nurse shook out a white sheet and used it to cover Jack's lower half.

The Doctor put his hand on Rose's shoulder. "Well, we'll just be go--"

"Oh, no you don't!" Jack popped back up again and looked to where Rose and The Doctor were headed for the door. "You're the one who wanted this thing out alive." He stopped to glance at the nurse who was tucking the sheet tightly around his hips. "It is going to come out alive, isn't it?"

"I see no reason to believe otherwise." She pulled the sheet tightly enough across Jack to make him squeak.

"Right, great," He went back to ignoring her and talking to The Doctor. "You're the one wanted this thing out alive. You're staying."

The Doctor looked up at the ceiling and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Jack," he began in a tone that tried very hard to be reasonable but was really only patronizing.

"I'll stay, how's that?" Rose interjected; she sounded exasperated. "Look. Even brought a blanket."

It stopped the two men from arguing only because they both turned to her with horrified -- and in Jack's case, groggy -- looks. "Rose," The Doctor started. "I don't think that's such a great idea," Jack finished.

She looked between the two of them and threw her hands into the air, the pink blanket fluttering around her arm. "Fine! We'll _all_ stay."

In the end no one left. Not Rose. Not The Doctor. Not Jack, who clearly was thinking about running away, butt-naked and high as a kite. Not the nurse who just as clearly would have rather been de-clawed than assigned this particular patient.

The doctor who came in to perform the surgery had four arms, something no one but Rose found the least bit odd (and Rose found absolutely fascinating). Jack was conscious through the entire procedure despite his protests that numb or not he didn't want to be awake and that he didn't exactly plan on bonding with the thing.

The Doctor -- Rose and Jack's Doctor -- planted himself in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest and Jack's shirt gripped in one fist. Rose stayed close to him with her arms wrapped around her waist, the Doctor's coat draped over them, the blanket over his coat.

Jack closed his eyes and tried to ignore the barely felt but unpleasantly cold sliding sensation just under his ribcage and the four-armed doctor's incessant and unintelligibly fast chatter. He missed the sting of the second injection, the oestrogen. He did not miss the awful tug and slide when the thing was pulled out of him.

He didn't open his eyes until he heard a soft "ergh" from the corner. He cracked one open then and looked past the scaled, bloody creature being held by the back of its neck over his chest to the corner where Rose was huddled against the Doctor.

"What did you expect, Rose, cute and fuzzy?" His voice was slurred almost beyond even his own recognition.

"Well, no but that's…" She wrinkled her nose and looked faintly repelled.

"Undeniably inhuman," The Doctor said, grinning widely. "With teeth, claws, and absolutely bursting with life. It's beautiful."

Jack met the Doctor's eyes and gave him a crooked, sloppy grin. "You would think that."

"I hate to interrupt," the other doctor interjected before anyone could get soppy. "But would someone please take this infant? I have a surgery to finish."

"Nuh uh," Rose said immediately.

"Busy," Jack answered cheerfully.

"Give it here," The Doctor volunteered and beckoned impatiently.

The nurse brought it over with a warning to "mind the sharp bits."

* * *

Three weeks after Jack was released from the hospital -- to the relief of both the patient and the medical staff-- they took the TARDIS to Lizzy the Leech's native planet. 

It was a lovely place, in its way. Hot and wet, covered with ancient forests whose canopy stretched unbroken for endless kilometers. There was civilization, of course, and settlements, but they were restricted to a few islands amongst a wilderness that absolutely teemed with life.

Jack stepped out of the TARDIS holding his squirming, mewling "child" by its scruff in front of him. The Doctor joined him on one side, Rose slipped out to stand at the other; neither stood particularly close. After living three weeks with that thing they had each gotten more than one nasty bite and none of them were taking chances on a parting encounter.

"Well," Jack said as he turned the creature around to face him. "I can't say it's been fun, but it's been a learning experience."

Lizzy hissed at him, a long pink tongue snaking out between row after row of gleaming teeth.

Jack put it down in a hurry. It snuffled and sniffed at his feet before it took a first tentative step out into the dense vegetation, then another.

When it was four steps away, The Doctor and Rose closed the distance to Jack and stood with him, their shoulders brushing his. The creature turned then to look at them with its head cocked and eyes gleaming.

"Do you think she'll be all right?" Rose worried. "She's still pretty small."

Jack started to respond, but he didn't have to. Lizzy leaped into the underbrush. There was a rustling commotion and sharp squeal, then she was off running, something bloody and furry hanging from her mouth

"She'll be just fine, Rose," The Doctor answered for Jack. "This is her world."

"And there's a settlement just beyond those trees," Jack said, nodding his head in the right direction. "They'll take her in."

Jack continued to look into the distance for another moment, then shook his head and put one arm around The Doctor's waist and the other around Rose's shoulders. "So, where to now?"

"Jack," Rose started.

"Jack," The Doctor warned.

Jack grinned and led them back to the TARDIS. "Don't worry," he said as he pulled the door shut. "I am never doing that again."


End file.
